“… it was an age of youthful enthusiasm, of noble and sincere feelings, and for all its blunders it will live for ever in the memory of mankind and serve to shock people out of their reverie whenever they seek to destroy or enslave their fellow men.”
In Carlyle’s words, “The diamond necklace vanished through the horn gate of dreams”; but its fame spread throughout Europe. None of the events that occurred in the decades leading up to the Revolution received press coverage, but contemporaries instinctively felt its fatal significance.
And even here, in far-away Hungary, at that time so desperately cut off from the mainstream of world events, it haunted people’s imagination. This is shown by the fact that a Jesuit father and neo-Latin poet, György Alajos Szerdahely, celebrated it in verses written in his fine Jesuit-humanist manner, mentioning each of the mythological personages who came to grief through the necklace.
DE MONILI FAMIGERATO, QUOD IN GALLIA MAGNAM LITEM, IN EUROPA EXPECTATIONEM CONCITAVIT ANNO MDCCLXXXV. ET VI
Quae Furia est? Certe illa fuit; fortasse Megaera
Quae Stygio retulit tale Monile specu?
Parcite Francigenae dirum adfectare Monile!
Thebaidem Statii Patria vestra legat.
Harmonie, et Semele, Iocasta, nocensque Eriphyle,
Atque alii interitu vos monuere suo.
Fatale est; et quisquis adhuc mortalis habebat,
Morte, vel infami labe Monile luit.
Lemnius huic varias pestes, laetumque venenum
Miscuit, et propriis hostibus ipse dedit.
Frustra ago. Romano vestitus murice Princeps
Heu! domino semper triste Monile petit.
Quid tibi femineo cum cultu et merce Sacerdos?
Femineum nescis sic recubare malum.
Infelix, quicunque putat se posse placere,
Dum sibi feminea credulitate placet.
Vos damna et poenas emitis? La Motthe feroces
Ad furias salvus triste Monile tulit.
Concerning the infamous necklace, the subject of a trial in France, which aroused great interest in Europe in 1785 and 1786.
Which Fury was that? For certain it was one; perhaps Megaera
Bringing the necklace back from the Stygian cave?
Beware, children of France, that dire necklace!
Let your countrymen study the Thebeiad of Statius.
Harmony and Semele, Jocasta and the mischievous Eriphyle
And others shall warn you of the ruin it brings.
It is fatal; and whatever mortal has so far possessed it
Has paid for it by death or deep shame.
With various plagues and deadly poison Apollo
Has infused it, and gives it to his very own enemies.
I speak in vain. A prince dressed in the purple of Rome
Pursues, alas! the unhappy necklace.
Oh priest, what have you to do with female adornments and hire?
You should know to beware of feminine malice.
Unhappy the man who thinks he can please
While pleasing himself with womanish credulity.
Will you purchase condemnation and imprisonment? It was La Motte
Who, himself unharmed, took the unhappy necklace to the wild Furies.
But the strongest literary response to the trial came from the greatest writers of the age, the giants of German classicism. Goethe, as we have already mentioned, visited Cagliostro’s family in Palermo and wrote a play about it called Der Gross-Kophta. The play does not rank among the best of his great Weimar productions, but on the other hand it is certainly not his weakest. The principals have no names, only titles. Some are slightly reduced in rank. The Queen is a mere duchess, the Cardinal a Domherr. True, Cagliostro remains a count, and the La Mottes are a marquis and marquise. The play, clearly for stage reasons, has a happy ending: a Ritter (knight) who is in love with the character corresponding to d’Oliva discovers the intrigue just in time, and the guilty parties receive their due punishment immediately after the truth is revealed about the scene in the Venus Bower. In the play the Graf, or Cagliostro, represents the comic element, and is a highly entertaining figure, a fine example of Goethe’s humour and gaiety.
Schiller, also under the influence of the event, wrote a great and sadly unfinished ghost story, Die Geisterseher—The Man Who Sees Ghosts. And while we are with Schiller, we cannot resist mentioning our hypothesis, difficult as it is to prove, that the necklace trial may also have inspired one of the truly great creations of world literature, his Don Carlos. We know of course that Schiller wrote the play on the basis of a conversation with an author called Saint-Real, and that Lessing’s Nathan der Weise encouraged him to stress the yearning for freedom; but if we study or even just glance through Don Carlos with the necklace trial in mind, we find interesting similarities of mood and atmosphere. The play begins in medias res: Don Carlos has long been languishing in despair of ever speaking face to face with the Queen. Someone goes between them and helps him to a meeting. Like Marie-Antoinette, the Queen is the unhappy and protesting prisoner of protocol.
In what follows, the entire action turns on letters that are stolen, handed over, recovered, and fall into the wrong hands, and you can find yourself quite lost among the huge number of documents (analogous to Marie-Antoinette’s letters to Rohan, Rohan’s to Jeanne, and the whole fog of mystery about this correspondence that Jeanne spreads around herself). Then there is the King’s secret and tragic suffering as he sits in solitude on the throne brooding over his wife’s fidelity — could Schiller have been thinking of Louis XVI? Chronology seems to confirm our theory. Schiller took a long time writing the play. One act was finished in 1785, and the completed work appeared in 1787, so it was composed precisely during the period of the necklace trial. That Schiller always followed, and indeed took the greatest interest in, the more sensational French criminal trials, is well known.
But now, as is proper, we must say some brief closing words about the subsequent fate of our dramatis personae — brief, because their later careers are of little real significance. The royal party are of course excepted: after the conclusion of our immediate narrative, they really did step into the centre stage of history, as their portion of suffering and martyrdom increased. The reader doubtless knows their story; so we will speak only of the others.
Jeanne de la Motte escaped to England in 1787. For a short while she lived off the éclat of the necklace trial, her malicious memoirs and supposed persecution. Thereafter she sank into the London underworld, fell into dreadful poverty, and in 1791, perhaps in one of her hysterical fits, threw herself out of a window and died. Her husband lived on. Little is known of his fate, but it could hardly be much to his credit. He ended his days in 1831, in a beggars’ hospital in Paris. The cursed Nibelung treasure had not brought him luck, or even wealth — but rather the “death or deep shame” predicted in Szerdahely’s verses.
Prince Rohan spent two years of banishment in his former cloister, then was allowed to return to Strasbourg just as the Revolution broke out. As a prelate he was also a member of the Estates General. He was later charged with counter-revolutionary practices, but never appeared before any court. From 1793 onwards he lived in his Ettenheim diocese as a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, one of his many titles. When in year nine of the Republic the Pope signed a Concordium with the new French state which gave the Assembly the right to appoint bishops, Rohan resigned his office and returned to his chateau, where he lived in retirement until his death in 1803, a proud, taciturn and forgotten relic of the Ancien Régime.